


Sincerely, Metaphorically, Dead Man Walking

by TheTartWitch



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, I chose zombies, M/M, School Assignment, This might actually be a big metaphor, Write a short story, Zombie Apocalypse, and eating people, for my life, gay zombies, introspective, there's no sex or anything they're just gay, they're not zombies when the gay stuff happens, zombie pov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-05
Updated: 2017-10-05
Packaged: 2019-01-09 11:23:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12275430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheTartWitch/pseuds/TheTartWitch
Summary: Title is??? under construction.Writing Project for school: short story about any topic. I chose zombies and they're gay because straight??? romance??? is hard???I dunno.





	Sincerely, Metaphorically, Dead Man Walking

**Author's Note:**

> I love zombies. I don't watch Walking Dead, though. I don't mean that kind of zombie. I mean the idea of zombies, the little ways they'd destabilize humanity until the foundation rotted away and there was no chance of being this way ever again. I mean zombies with varying intelligence, who go with the flow and eat people and walk around because hey. everyone else is doing it.   
> Favorite zombie films/books? I Am Legend with Will Smith and Warm Bodies by Isaac somebody. I forget his last name.

He remembers being alive. He imagines it as something dull, though; the sensation has gone out of his memories and taken the emotion with it, and now all he can remember is the way he had huddled in the attic of his house before he’d been found and, well, after that he doesn’t have any memories. There is only the wandering, the waking in the ruins of a place he can’t quite recall, and gathering with others who seem dazed beyond compare. 

They don’t speak to each other. There is quiet grumbling before the silence, through which they discover that there isn’t much to say and no way to say it if there was. He stumbles, legs failing him again and again, beside a woman with tangled hair and tear tracks on her cheeks. He notices, as the days go by and they don’t speak, they don’t stop, they don’t sleep, that her fingers whittle into bone and then into claws and all the while they are walking through the town. There is a drumbeat they march to, one of staccato stops and tremulous starts. There is a wailing to the rhythm of society cracking into an abyss.

(It is the fifth day, he thinks, that he eats someone first. He can’t remember; it is getting harder and harder to recognize when the sun sets and rises, and he is so very hungry. Nothing else really seems to matter anymore but the hunger and the way blood pounds under skin as the other people run away.)

He is losing himself in his lack of self-control, he thinks. They are chasing a group of five into a building, and he remembers that he was surprised, earlier, at the number of people still here. Maybe there are supposed to be more, and he’s already forgotten? It doesn’t matter. He has caught one of the people running, a man of nearly twenty it appears, and they are screaming  _ so loudly _ . He doesn’t care what they’re saying, he just wants the noise to stop, so he reaches out to shut him up, to make him  _ be quiet _ , and there are claws like the woman’s extending towards the man and finally,  _ finally _ , there is blessed silence again. The man is slumping, gasping, to the floor and clutching at his throat with hands that don’t end in boney claws and something is seeping down his shirt (don’t people these days understand hygiene?) and clotting darkly on the floor, but the night is coming and the carpeting is dark in here anyway, so hopefully no one will notice. 

When they finally move on from that group, he’s covered in blood and there’s something sticky against the skin of his mouth and cheeks but it doesn’t matter. Nothing really matters these days. 

\--

Time is lost on him. He flounders in a haze of repetition, existing solely through the flow of the others’ movement. He is sure, somewhere deep inside him where it is still wrong to do what he’s done, that time is passing and his body is doing things, is slowing and skidding and sliding to a stop as time passes. Sometimes he is eating because he is hungry and sometimes he is eating because he is bored and sometimes he can’t tell if he’s eating or not. 

He does notice the people. There are still people here, barricaded into a stadium with their guns out in the entrance to the street like it’s not illegal, who stare at him with contempt and spit at the concrete as he passes by like water isn’t precious now (he sees so very little of it) and tell each other not to waste bullets on a defective one but shoot at him anyway. He can’t tell if they hit or not. It isn’t important.

After a while of this, the method of the people changes. They gather the ones like him, the ambling ones, together in a pen, almost, and they talk quietly. They talk about how they used to live, with jobs and routines and safety (or something nearing it) for their children. They don’t mention hiding in their attics or being terrified because they didn’t know what was coming next, though he’s sure they felt that. They don’t say why they’ve got their guns, but they don’t need to. He can hear it, every time they shoot someone who isn’t in the pen. The boom of it echoes in all the spaces he hides himself in, deep inside himself, but as they talk to him he finds himself crawling out of that hole, away from the fear and pain and  _ helpmehelpmehelpme _ he’d hidden himself beneath until all that was left was the forgetfulness and the hunger. He wants to hear them describe the crowded subway or bicycling to school when the grass was still wet in the morning, or the girl they’d had a crush on at work, before everything went bad. He wants to be reminded of everything he hadn’t known he’d forgotten, and as they talk it comes back to him in segments. 

He remembered that subway, and the bridge without a footpath, and the boy he’d smiled with and walked home hand-in-hand. He remembered being worried that morning, when the boy didn’t come home, and checking the news for something that would detain him, and he remembered dropping his glass of water as the news anchor screamed, how it shattered on the kitchen tile. He remembered crying as he locked the door. He remembered opening it for the boy. He remembered hiding, because the boy wasn’t the same anymore: the charming smile gone jagged with blood and missing teeth; the laugh he’d fallen for smothered in a groan; the way the boy had shambled through the house looking for him, and finally figured out the attic’s ladder enough to climb it. He remembered that he’d spent the final moments of his life both terrified and relieved that if he was going to die, at least it would be because of the one he’d already given his life to.

He is awake now. The sunlight burns him through, and he feels cleansed. The people on the walls are shouting and pointing at him as he cries in the middle of a field of zombies. The others are not interested in him; he is still grey and bruised and awkward, and they are looking at the living on the walls, desperate for something to bury themselves in to keep the pain from coming back. The woman is there. She is staring at her hands, watching the way the light is shining in her fingernails. She is crying, too; it trails through the tracks on her cheeks and hits the ground like a scar on the earth healing over. 

He wonders where the boy is. He wonders where he is, and where he’s going, and if he’s going anywhere at all (he wonders if he can go back to where he’d been before, and doubts it is possible). He wonders what life will be like, without the shroud of thoughtlessness to keep the sunlight from burning him. He looks back at the woman. He needs reassurance. He needs something to think about that isn’t what he’d become.

She is looking at someone on the wall, eyes wide.

She is smiling. 

**Author's Note:**

> I hope the fact that none of the characters have names isn't confusing? I kept them all straight in my head, but I know that doesn't always translate very well.


End file.
